Track By Tracks: Eye Of The Golem - Nigredo (2024)

Andrea, vocalist and bass player answers:

About the title ‘NIGREDO’, it’s from Latin: “Blackened, or black colour”, it’s the first step to getting the philosopher’s stone. Everything in the transformation must become a uniform black plasma before the processes that would lead to obtaining “La Grande Opera”, the philosopher’s stone like I said. Carl Gustav Jung too used this metaphor for analytical psychology, to try to catch and create the roots of psychology in something similar to a metaphysical way.

However, I think this title and all its meanings hidden or not are good things to create art and music mixed with the great pictures of Django! But I can’t stand all the occultism in music anymore, I think it’s really boring and depressing that some musicians today try to explain the world and their life in an esoteric occult way: I think it’s only an excuse to make other stupid things, I prefer sci-fi books!

About the album in its entirety, the right glue for all the riffs of the songs is the drumming of Hari. He comes from a hardcore school, but I was able to evolve himself in a doom metal posthardcore way, and I think for a drummer it’s a hard way, to try to get back into the game in another genre! His way of playing drums is really powerful but not too much: it’s elegant in a brutal way! Like a mix between the Steve Albini school, Iggor Cavalera, John Stanier, and Abe Cunningham. For Example in ‘Quantum Prison’ you can hear the great connection between my bass and the drum beat, probably the best feeling connection of nervous tension, hysteria, and anxiety!

The history of the started a long time ago, five years more or less, Like a Duo, with different directions and ways to make music: more minimal, more melodic, more stoner. After a long and big transformation, we became a quartet, with only, Hari the drummer from the original lineup; this meant an awareness and a change of direction. We wanted to start to be more personal and original, not in a forced intellectual and boring sense but with spontaneity, we don’t want to be a copy of another famous band, indeed we try to be us. Probably now you can hear only a few roots of the started sound of the past because we are a post-metal band really heavy in sound and attitude, always downtempo doom metal of course, but with many many different influences, like posthardcore, post-metal, postpunk, industrial and electronic sounds in general. Maybe you can find some of Joy Division in some bass lines, or Swedish distorted chords like Edge Of Sanity, Opeth, and Katatonia!

P.S. Probably Django doesn’t know I have a love/hate relationship towards the sea, I love it but I fear the deep bottom that I cannot see; strange coincidence right? Well now about the album track by track...

1. BLACK CATHEDRAL:

We start with one of the last songs we wrote, ‘Black Cathedral’, one of the biggest works we did, more than eleven minutes! I think a standard time for some of our songs now and more in the future! By the way the song lyrics, like all of the songs of the album, are written by me, and this one like the others’s an instinctive stream of consciousness. Like sound, it’s a classic Eye Of The Golem mix of brutal slow parts but surrounded by circular guitar melodic poetry, psychedelic parts with more silent and violent explosions of sound, and desperate screams or brutal growl, like in death metal but more from black metal style I suppose. It’s a mystical song in some ways: there’s an instrumental part with a little recited part of the voice, the only one melodic part of the throat in the album, with a little piece with vocoder too, like Kraftwerk! The lyrics narrate a dream I had in my childhood... Jesus! I can still remember it well today after almost forty years. There was a mystical Christian religious appearance in the backyard of my house, I’m not religious I’m agnostic, but it was; and then I walked near the park that was completely like a desert, with a black gothic cathedral in the middle, with the roof destroyed and ruined. I went inside the dark place And I looked into the blue sky, no fear. After I speak about the meaning of life from my perspective: life is survival, with a big parenthesis between love and suffering until you die. I have black humor I think, you can see the movie ‘The Meaning Of Life’ Of Monthy Python, probably one of the most grotesque but truthful explanations about life, or what we can understand with our retarded mind.

2. STARVATION:

Ok, ‘Starvation’, is our second album single. The body of the song was almost ready when I joined the band, and it was the first I wrote the lyrics and I sang. It’s a classical Andrea Giuliani lyrics about a description of the life of the people of planet Earth: life is without sense, we don’t have an instruction booklet, like in CD or boardgames for example, and only our society or our parents can teach us something about a thing called moral and ethics. So in reality we turn in circles as long as our strength allows us, until we fall, no one knows where we end. The heavy melodies are more syncopated probably than the other songs, but still sad and psychedelic too with a long instrumental comet at the end which transforms into a heavy gigantic doom riff. I made the photo in Istanbul probably more than ten years ago, it was modified by our guitarist Alessandro; really weird picture, but this tower is only an aqueduct!

3. ABSENCE OF BODY DOESN’T MEAN DEATH:

Probably this is a blues, and nobody in the band noticed! It’s a heavy song, with a really but complicated minimalistic songwriting, slow and with a pachydermal proceed. The final instrumental part it’s full of noisy sounds and voices made by our guitarist Marc, and it’s guided by tribal rhythm and held together by my distorted bassline tense and nervous like Godflesh taught me. The lyrics are the most optimistic words of the album, the resume is: there’s a light at the end, not everything can be terrible!

4. PSYCHIC WALLS OF DESPERATION:

Our first single from this album, the pic was taken by me in the city of Ferrara: it looks like a strange artwork or logo for a black or death metal band, but it’s only an artistic old gate of a bank! It was mixed by my girlfriend to have this gloomy result. The song is one of the newest of ‘NIGREDO’, most of the songwriting is from our guitarist Alessandro, and traces the path together with ‘BLACK CATHEDRAL’ towards our true personal style. There are modern hardcore parts, violent postmetal growls, and really heavy guitar riffs and screams, mixed with psychedelic doom traits. Lyrics always probably from my childhood, everything is about the stupid human inability of not being able to remember everything in one's memory, but choosing only a few things, especially from the past, and perhaps wanting more memories that bring a smile and not horror from us.

5. QUANTUM PRISON:

Our “black metal” song mixed with posthardcore and post-metal, an idea of our guitarist Marco. A strange track mixed with a lot of influences, especially black metal, and doom, and lyrics about a topic really trendy in the 80s in Europe: heroine! But not only this one, other things about feeling imprisoned in this reality: a kind of three dimensions added with time, with everybody trapped in our body... This is hell.

6. THE ABYSSAL ZEITGEIST WILL TEAR YOU APART:

One of the oldest songs I created, I think we consider it our suite, more than ten minutes, with a progression of different parts, from the darkly melodic first part, the song evolves in an industrial metal riff, and then with the culmination of a very heavy doom riff that I created over twenty years ago! After a melodic robust part that reminds me Hüsker Dü, I don’t know why. Lyrics about the way to live our lives in Western capitalism: produce, purchase, consume, with ever greater speed until the destruction of the human race.